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Thursday, 19 December 2013

In the first year of the Lorde, it was hard to
ignore her, especially living in New Zealand. Hard to ignore her as she became the first solo New Zealand artist to top the US
charts. Hard to ignore her as mass saturation of her every move, every lunch
she shared, every comment she made was news. Mention of her youth, her canny sense of
riding the wave of a backlash against capitalism. Everything she did was
acknowledged to the point where I was bored of Lorde. I tried to not like her
songs but Royals was something that I couldn’t shake so it made this list. Looking
down the list, I noticed that there were quite a few songs by artists who I
would describe as post-grunge-the likes of Coliseum and Roomrunner. Fitting in
that this year saw both the 20th anniversary reissue of In Utero and
Nirvana’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There’s also an
appearance by Pearl Jam, who released another pretty underwhelming album with
one decent in Mind Your Manners. Kanye West and Vampire
Weekend were the only two acts to have two songs to feature on the list. In
Modern Vampires of the City, Vampire Weekend made my year’s favourite album. I’ve
always been a Vampire Weekend fan-boy and I’ve been a bit bemused by some of
the backlash directed against them. Modern Vampires of the City doesn’t have
any immediate songs but it has a collection of great songs, signaling a more
mature but not more boring album. Yeesus by Kanye West has left me divided-I
like a number of songs on it but as a whole, I can’t say it’s a great album,
certainly not in the league of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Kanye has
never been a great lyricist or even a great rapper but he does make interesting
compelling music. He might be impatient for croissants but he remains music’s
most vital artist

Monday, 3 June 2013

We passed in silence through the darkness, as our
guide maneuvered our punt past smooth rocks that were only centimetres from our
face. Our necks ached from looking up at the ceiling at the thousands of tiny
luminous spheres that hung there. Some say that they look like haphazardly
strung fairy lights, others say they remind them of the Northern lights. I
preferred to think of them as a facsimile of the night sky, a place that you
could bring someone to show them what the night sky used to look like if some
catastrophe, man-made or otherwise, conspired to deprive us of a starry view.
Of course, there’s none of the same constellations present. Nonetheless,
looking up at the lights gave you the same sense of awe as a starry night in a
suitably dim part of Earth. The ceiling of this natural Sistine Chapel is made
up of lures, the result of the labour of a fungus gnat, more commonly known as
a glow-worm.The lures emit light
that first tempt insects to them, then traps them, leaving a tasty little
morsel for the glow-worm to digest at its leisure.

Punting in the caves.

This spectacle took place in Te Anau's glow worm caves.To get to the glow worm caves, you have to take a boat from Te Anau, the gateway town to New Zealand’s largest and probably most spectacular national park, Fiordland and leave civilization behind (if a town of 2000 can be called civilization). The half hour boat heads across Lake Te Anau, New Zealand’s second biggest lake, taking you over to a lost world of tree terns and dense forest, a remnant of what the South Island used to look like before human settlement, before successive waves of settlers, first Maori and then European, burnt away much of the island’s vegetation. In places like this, things can easily get lost. Moose, liberated here in 1910, probably no longer survive but the possibility remains that they remain hidden in impenetrable bush. Romantics hold out hope that moas, New Zealand’s giant bird, may still hang on in the inhospitable and little explored mountains. The chances of moa and moose still living in Fiordland is probably fanciful but no more so than the assertion made in Gavin Menzies historical-fantasy book, “1421: The year China discovered the world”. In that book, Menzies, (which was released as a non-fiction book) said that Chinese explorers released giant sloths that they had captured in South America (despite the facts that giant sloths have probably been extinct for 10 millennia and that the Chinese have never been conclusively shown to have been to New Zealand pre-European colonization) and then released at least a pair of these beasts into Fiordland. Some hope for the megafauna believers was found in the Murchinson Mountains, the mountains above the caves, that are also the last stronghold of the takehe, a bird considered extinct until a small population was revealed to a very interested public in 1948. You know that a species is endangered if all the members of the species are given a name that is the case for the 200 or so takehe that are survived the extinction precipice. The caves themselves were lost, only known as part of Maori folklore, but remained undiscovered by Europeans until 1948 (1948 seemed to be a good year for rediscovery) when they were finally “re-discovered” after three years of searching

Mary and a takehe (Note: Not to scale)

The caves are accessed by walking down a short track from the visitor centre, before you head into the narrow opening that makes you appreciate why it took three years of searching before the caves were “re-found”. A small stream pushes its way out, twisting and coursing its way through the limestone, the main protagonist in forming the caves that are still being aggressively carved out, creating violent eddies and whirlpools in this young (in geological terms anyway) cave system. Water runs down the sculptured rock-walls and in places, congregates to form waterfalls. In pools under the largest one, we could see eels, hovering, perhaps waiting for food to fall down to them. It was here that the guides snapped at people for using their cameras (our party was not immune to criticism) and issued last warnings to not talk; light and sound seemingly being the natural and mortal enemies of glow-worms.

Heading out across Lake Te Anau

From
here on in, the caves were accessed by punt. This is not a trip that recommends itself to
claustrophobics, as the boat, small by necessity, passes
by walls so close that if you put your hands out, both sides could be touched simultaneously. Thankfully, for the nerves
of any claustrophobes on the trip, just how tight the cave was, was largely
obscured by the profound darkness. Just as you start to get accustomed to the
dark, you see stabs of light that signal the glow-worm spectacle is just ahead.

Close-up of the glow worms.

You then reach the main cavern; you look up and out and take in this Milky Way
of thousands of little lights that pierce the darkness, justifying the
unofficial name used by the national caving association, Aurora. You spend five
to ten minutes in the dark. The quiet is unnerving, only broken by excited
murmuring and contented sighs before you head back from where you’ve came, back
out into the sunshine, out of the quiet which is first broken by the sound of
rushing water then by the sounds of native songbirds, that are reasonably
prolific in this part of New Zealand. I had done this trip before as a child
but I couldn’t remember much of it-couldn’t remember much at all in fact apart
from the darkness of the cave. This time, I think I’ll remember much more of
this magnificent natural spectacle.